Given that movements such as OER are not advocates of chaotic, unpredictable learning, but in fact appear to desire similar outcomes to those achieved by organised education, we might contend that reasoned thinking must play some part the structuring of the OER project. Therefore, it is not the concept of negative liberty itself that is problematic, but rather the premise that its realisation will achieve predefined goals; that an expected order will somehow emerge from unrestrained action.

When we conceive of learner as knowmad, the traditional roles assigned to teacher and student become less relevant, necessary, and linear. The knowmad is mobile and learns with anybody, anywhere, anytime. As such, the place we now know as school may be too small and perhaps unable to contain the range of learning engagements necessary for those with nomadic tendencies. Rather, think of the extended community--one that is physical, virtual, and blended-- as potential learning spaces that our knowmadic traveler composes, accesses, participates in, abandons, and changes.

In the pre-in­dus­trial age, no­mads were peo­ple that moved with their liveli­hood (usu­ally an­i­mal herd­ing) in­stead of set­tling at a sin­gle lo­ca­tion. In­dus­tri­al­iza­tion forced the set­tle­ment of many no­madic peo­ples…

…but, some­thing new is emerg­ing in the 21st cen­tury: Know­mads.

A know­mad is what I term a no­madic knowl­edge worker -that is, a cre­ative, imag­i­na­tive, and in­no­v­a­tive per­son who can work with al­most any­body, any­time, and any­where. In­dus­trial so­ci­ety is giv­ing way to knowl­edge and in­no­va­tion work.

For our purposes, consider a MOOC to be a free, open-ended, online course involving potentially thousands of participants using all kinds of social tools like websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, discussion forums — you name it — to discuss and learn about a topic from every angle and generate a body of knowledge that all can share.

the necessary ingredients for a MOOC: Knowledge or the opposite of knowledge: a question to which you don't have an answer, but that you'd like to have answered. People to serve as facilitators. A digital infrastructure.

Really big caveat: of course, all of this abundance talk is only relevant to us who are the privileged few, who do not need to worry about where we will sleep this evening, or how we will feed our children…

This made Stanford the latest of a handful of elite American universities to pull back the curtain on their vaunted courses, joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project, Yale University’s Open Yale Courses and the University of California at Berkeley’s Webcast.Berkeley, among others.

The difference with the Stanford experiment is that students are not only able to view the course materials and tune into recorded lectures for CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence; they are also invited to take in-class quizzes, submit homework assignments, and gather for virtual office hours with the course’s two rock star instructors — Peter Norvig, a research executive at Google who used to build robots for NASA, and Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford who also works for Google, designing cars that drive themselves. (M.I.T., Yale and Berkeley simply make the course materials freely available, without offering the opportunity to interact with the professors or submit assignments to be graded.)

Based on the success of Norvig and Thrun’s experiment, the university’s computer science department is planning to broadcast eight additional courses for free in the spring, most focusing on high-level concepts that require participants already to have a pretty good command of math and science.

what is a self-organising system? They don't define. In a strict sense there cannot be such a thing - if any thing is in touch with its environment then it is being organised by its environment as much as by itself. Alternatively, "self-organising" is an unnecessary tautology - it doesn't add anything to the idea of a thing being a system. At best, chaos/complexity is a very loose analogy, not very helpful - because this learning network process is not shown to behave in exactly the ways prescribed by Prigogine etc (the makers of chaos theory). At best it suggests that the learnings gained by the participants are not initially foreseen (as they are supposed to be in a more formal education programme). In principle chaos/complexity theory could be used to explore the trajectory of learning in the system, if not that of individual participants.